Sam Fender gives a tender and powerful performance in London’s O2 Arena

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You can measure the popularity of a song at a Sam Fender concert by the number of forefingers pointing at the stage. For the most popular in the O2 Arena, there was a smattering of digits, many thousands of them, all aimed at Fender in his Bob Dylan T-shirt as he sang and played guitar. It looked like a rough electoral tally. Hands up if you like this one.

Some acts get confused by mass support: they lose track of what they want to do amid the noise. But Fender makes a living from it. The singer-songwriter from North Shields, near Newcastle, represents a working-class circle that has found itself out of British cultural life in recent decades. His songs tend to start with a decent clip and then gather momentum until they seem unstoppable. This is when the pointing fingers are at their most abundant. Up to the sunny highlands – or its symbolic stand-in, the big stage illuminated with bright lights.

His show at London’s O2 Arena, the first of two, came near the end of a UK and Ireland tour that sold out within hours. The opening track “Dead Boys”, from his 2019 debut Hypersonic missilestackled a difficult subject, the suicide of young men in Fender’s economically depressed hometown. “Let’s see you, London,” he shouted in his thick Geordie accent as the song shifted gears with thumping drums and guitars and the crowd tumbled around amid clouding spotlights. Their rays picked people out at random: anyone can be a star. Hope is Fender’s currency, not accusation or despondency.

He stood at the microphone stand with his seven-piece band arranged around him. His right-hand man was lead guitarist Dean Thompson, a childhood friend. Drew Michael gave the songs their acceleration at the drum kit. A female newcomer to the otherwise all-male band, Brooke Bentham, sang backing vocals. Johnny Davis on sax emphasized the songs’ affinity with Bruce Springsteen’s blue-collar anthems.

The debt is acknowledged: Springsteen’s “Born to Run” played before the show began. But Fender doesn’t throw himself around the stage like his American forebears. He invited a young fan from the audience to join him on acoustic guitar for “The Borders,” a tribune-of-the-people act, though it was done without the showman pizzazz that Springsteen would have brought. Fender is a different performer. His appeal lies in not seeming superhuman.

He sang with both tenderness and muscularity, rising to a great vibrato during the most passionate passages. Mosh pits opened on the floor of the venue for a frantic couple of tracks, “Howdon Aldi Death Queue” and “Spice”, which was followed by a punchy version of The Clash’s “London Calling”, sung by Thompson and guitarist-keyboardist. Joe Atkinson. At the other end of the musical spectrum, Fender opened “The Dying Light” alone at a piano, cursing and laughing as he strummed the chords.

The biggest response came for the last song before the encore, the heart-swelling, air-noise title track of 2021’s Seventeen goes under. Its successor People are watching will be released in February. A lumpy-sounding track from it, “Nostalgia’s Lie,” didn’t get fingers pointing. But Fender inspired a song with “Arm’s Length,” which had a twiddly Fleetwood Mac-inspired guitar riff. And the album’s pounding lead single “People Watching” was greeted almost as fervently as “Seventeen Going Under”. The next test awaits for Fender, but its outcome appears to be predetermined. This felt like a victory lap.

★★★★☆

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